The coming zombie apocalypse

Will Bunch

STAFF COLUMNIST

Will Bunch has worked at the Daily News for 20-plus years and is now senior writer. Since 2005, he’s written the uber-opinionated, fair-but-dangerously unbalanced opinion blog "Attytood," covering a range of topics (but mostly politics and the media these days); it’s been named best blog in the state by the Associated Press Managing Editors and best blog in the city by Philadelphia Magazine. He’s also authored three full-length books and three Amazon Kindle Single e-books, including 2015’s The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, he worked at New York Newsday, where he was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.

It was a dark and stormy time. Early cyclones brewed in the North Atlantic, and flesh-eating zombies strolled the streets, generating many headlines on the Drudge Report. And in a related matter, Willard Mitt Romney was elected the 45th president of the United States.

Put a fork in it for No. 44, Barack Obama. The horrific job numbers that came out on Friday, and the all but certain likelihood that all the job reports between now and November will be equally bad (thanks Europe) seems to have guaranteed a Romney (Zomney?) inauguration in January 2013, and an all-Republican Congress to boot.

And all that that implies -- more tax cuts for the rich, more program cuts for the poor, more ill-guided adventures overseas, wars on women and on voting rights, with outcomes sure to drive a nation that was the world's greatest powerhouse just a half-century ago closer to the eve of destruction.

You could feel it in the air this weekend, the palpable aroma of a one-term presidency. And the biggest mistake that Barack Obama has made these last three-and-a-half years was teeing it up for their looming era of exceptional American unexceptionalism, the real zombie apocalypse.